2010-11

My work has evolved into a hybrid-practice that combines painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and digital imaging into larger installations with particular and unique reference to color and light and to physical space. I participate in the expansion of painting’s boundaries while traversing them in three specific content areas. Transparent-Mystery: Transforming unlikely everyday materials into art with limited alteration so as to remain recognizable as they inexplicably begin to appear mysterious and opaque. Fragment-Whole: Creating large installations that first appear as a single whole, but which then appear to break down into relational object-clusters, which break down further still into distinguishable and separate parts, only to reverse again into the one larger visual whole. Time-Continuum: Making diverse cultural references that link the historical with contemporary; Altering older work and combining it with new; And, as in a recent solo in New York, visually and conceptually linking my current exhibition with one from my past, as well as linking it with the gallery’s previous and future exhibits.

In recent work I return to the painterly gesture describing an illusionistic image on canvas. These new paintings however are meant to be quotations of familiar images, in this case, Japanese motifs and decoration.* The motif-paintings are treated simply as another everyday material or image-object that I combine with other recognizable objects to make art. They are inserted and arranged as one component of many, inside what I call a cluster. I see each cluster as an individual and complete work of art that relates to other clusters nearby, and so on, until the entire single installation is achieved. The intention is to equalize the value of the familiar Japanese image with the common, everyday objects used. These cluster-pieces, or pods of visual narrative, radiate out to other pod-narratives, mirroring our hyper-linked, web-based lives, and the loss of an historic linear narrative.

For at least a decade, I have manipulated the commonplace materials and various kinds of ephemera of foreign cultures while living in those cultures. My material and contextual manipulations then make multiple iconographic references, from the modernist grid to computer circuitry, from the Italian Baroque to Japanese art and Anime, etc. When my early drawing/collages, using paper labels and stickers, began to impersonate the look and geometry of computer circuit boards (2000-1), I was inspired to enlist real computer circuitry to ‘re-draw’ the label designs as digital files in graphics software. The result closed the circle: Paper labels mimicking circuitry that in turn mimics paper labels. I want to have it both ways: exploit the glamour and scope of technology while retaining the political agency of art made with my hands out of mundane materials. This position stands against, while it gains traction from, a pervasive culture of spectacular images controlled by a triumvirate of powerful industries in three distinct locations: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Madison Avenue.

In the part-digital paintings of 2001-4, digitally drawn files of labels were manipulated and arranged within the computer, then printed directly to canvas as structural blueprints for paintings. (Or printed to other media for prints, wraps, giant murals, or 3-D laminations) I then painted into these canvases with a precise hand to blur the line between the handmade mark and the mechanical one. Photographic imagery can be included. This work demands that I resist the painterly brush stroke in an attempt to re-imagine painting in the age of digital reproduction, painting which inhabits a realm between original and repro, rigid and loose, high and low.

* The Japanese influence is a result of a Fulbright Specialist Grant where I spent the summer of 2008 as a Visiting Artist at Kyoto University of Art & Design. It is Part 2 of a long-term project entitled, “Ephemera & Culture: Italy, Turkey, and Japan—a Trilogy,” three bodies of artwork initiated in, and made from the ephemera of, three distinct cultures outside the U.S. Part 1, “Italy,” began at the American Academy in Rome where I was a Visiting Artist in 2003-4.